Ever Deepening

Corps à Corps

Now, some of you are certainly thinking that it was long past time to take
off the kid gloves. I reiterate our initial
admonition: please respect our dreams. In trying to keep this story a
universal romance, I've largely elided the political, legal and spiritual
combat.

We also had reason to forgive. From the very beginning, and even more so as
we grew stronger, our opponents have cultivated us. Jewel was in deeper, and
couldn't work her way out. I simply didn't want to have anything to do with
people that:

Considered me to be their enemy if I was a friend of their enemy.

Subscribed to militaristic messianic delusions.

Believed that women are a fundamentally superior species.

Believed that men are the unique repository of human rationality.

I can think of at least five traditions that subscribe to one or all of the
above. I've struggled with four of them.

I've been offered relationships with other women, many of them beautiful,
powerful and talented, and some imbued with grace. Jewel tolerated dalliances.
In part, she felt that she no longer had a claim on me, but she also had come
to have faith that association with me made people stronger. Once people
receive love, they yearn to love themselves. Our opponents have lost a lot of
allies to us.

And ultimately, it always came back to her. In most cases, it was the lady
that broke it off. The tenderness of the devotion expressed in the lyrics of
Winterwood, the disorientation they felt upon penetrating my
quotidian façade, or the magnitude and scope of my ambitions for love:
most women just didn't want to compete. In the darkest moments, when Jewel was
most distant, I determined that I would devote myself to laying groundwork for
the next life. I hoped that publishing the main body of this work would
alleviate the burden of fear that we had been forced to push against this time.

But life had a few more surprises for us. I'm sure that many more are yet to
come.